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Hootsuite

All right, you know about my love affair with software. And you know I love exploring new stuff. You also know I hate online versions of most things. I don’t like Google Docs, don’t like online blogging clients (HOORAY for Windows Live Writer, I says!), and generally don’t like online clients for things like Facebook and Twitter.

Hootsuite is a social networking update dashboard which allows you to update your Twitter, Facebook and other social networking accounts from a single interface. If you’re familiar with Digsby, it’s a similar idea, except in an online format, and doesn’t include a chat client.

Hootsuite lets you update your Twitter account and your Facebook account at the same time with the same message. But its most powerful feature is the ability to update both accounts (or others you’ve added to it) at a future date and time.

As little as five minutes can be used as a buffer, or any time in increments of five minutes. You can also choose a day in advance. For writer buddies, this is useful for tweeting about upcoming book releases and announcements which take place on a specific day. So you can pimp your book release on the release date if you want, and do it on the day you GET the release date. Very cool.

Or, if you know about something happening, you can update your Facebook account status with the information far in advance of knowing it. Very convenient, and this has many business and promotional uses for pro bloggers or web-presences.

The drawbacks include not being able to EDIT the information in a pre-dated tweet or status update. I can’t see any way to delete one once you’ve scheduled it, either. So be careful to make sure the information you’re including for future updates isn’t going to change between when you schedule it and when it actually updates.

Check out Hootsuite and see if it can work for you. I’ve been using it a lot to announce and promote my #FridayFlash pieces. Because of my situation and the limited access to the ‘Net I have right now, Hootsuite works great for me. It lets me update the account(s) I want and I don’t have to be online for more than a few minutes to input a lot of updates for later posting. Very cool.

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8 thoughts on “Hootsuite”

Ooooh, cheater! I thought you were online and just didn’t want to chat with me. *pouts*

LOL! Why would I ignore ya? Heh? Why?! 😉

Just kidding. I might try that one. Digsby’s too big. There’s another online one called Threadsy. It’s pretty cool, but sometimes I’m overwhelmed with all the information being in one place. That’s the reason I let Twitter go and just update FB now. I can’t keep up with it all.

And I do the opposite — only update Twitter and IT updates FB. Hehehe. I’m going to do Threadsy next, but I don’t use it, so I have to check it out first.

I’ve got an amazing thing that allows my friends to keep up with what I’m doing at all times. It’s more hardware than it is software and the technology is pretty well available to everybody. It’s called telephone. By keying in my unique telephone identification sequence (or phone number) my telephone communication device (or phone) will signal (ring) and I can communicate (talk) with the person who keyed in my unique telephone identification sequence (called me) in real time. It’s an amazing technology. I recommend everybody use this technology.

Sounds great. Why don’t you give me a call and we can chat about it? Oh, that’s right … you haven’t given me your UTI. And you don’t have mine. And yet, here we are, communicating through the Internet somehow. Must be a miracle.

My eyes cross when things start to get this complicated. This site and that site and then a meta-thingy to co-ordinate all the other electro-thingies…. *sigh*. I just update Twitter when I feel like it and hopefully someone might read it. If not tough beans for me. That’s about as complicated as I want to be.

Honestly, this is a professional application for people really using Twitter and Facebook for promotional purposes, but anyone can do it. I like the future update thing. And I just got an email from someone at Hootsuite saying you CAN edit the scheduled updates, so I’ll have to update my post tomorrow. But hey, if social networking isn’t the thing for you, that’s why they make chocolate AND vanilla, right?